Carl S Shapiro <cshapiro@sparky.ic.sunysb.edu> writes:

>>       (2)  the standard tools  to crunch binaries together into
>>            one statically-linked binary don't work with mips ELF.

>I remeber seeing on the OpenBSD mailing list a message from Peter Da Silva
>about how his new version of crunch is object file format independent.


Uh, the version of crunch in the NetBSD tree is by *James* DaSilva,
and while it may be ``object-file independent'' -- it works on
NetbSD/alpha with ELF binaries, for instance -- the version in the
NetBSD tree does not work with mips ELF.

On NetBSD/pmax, GNU ld can't link together the output of crunch,
because it hides the global symbols against which file-level symbols
are relocated (or possibly smashes the symbol type, see the XXX
comment in the crunchide source), and GNU ld for MIPS-elf can't handle
that.

I'd guess either James DaSilva hasn't tried it on a mips, or OpenBSD
has a fix we don't, or (if this is a MIPS-elf specific problem and not
just a bug) athe ``object-file-independence'' doesn't mean it's truly
universal.